In this post, I am going to show 11 popular video editing software available on Linux. I will not cover subjective merits such as usability or interface design, but instead highlight notable features of each video editor. If you have tried any particular video editor listed here, feel free to share your experience or opinion.

Dan Nanni is the founder and also a regular contributor of Xmodulo.com. He is a Linux/FOSS enthusiast who loves to get his hands dirty with his Linux box. He likes to procrastinate when he is supposed to be busy and productive. When he is otherwise free, he likes to watch movies and shop for the coolest gadgets.

I'm using avidemux as well but what annoyed me was that you have to cut exactly at a key frame (or you'll see some corrupted frames) if you want to use the "copy" mode.

In my ideal dream world I'd use Pitivi (or actually the underlying "gstreamer editing services") to do that and Pitivi would ensure that I can cut every frame I want (I don't mind re-encoding a few frames if that's not a key frame). That would be highly useful to cut out commercials from tv recordings. Well, let's hope the Pitivi fundraiser gets enough money so that the "smart rendering" feature is going to be implemented...

Of those listed in that article, my favorite by far is +OpenShot Video Editor. It's fairly powerful while being easy to use, and should be even better once v2.0 is released sometime in the fairly near future. However, it's not really a professional-quality editor. It's meant to be a consumer-quality editor along the lines of iMovie, and has a similar set of features. You can do fairly professional-quality editing on it, but that generally involves using it conjunction with InkScape and Blender.

I also use Avidemux, but not actually for much editing. It's great for splicing clips together, transcoding, and muxing tracks, but for anything more than that it's not very user-friendly and you really have to know what you're doing.

I tried Pitivi when it was (briefly) the default video editor for Ubuntu, but at the time it was buggy with a very limited set of features. It's supposedly improved quite a bit since then, but I haven't had any reason to try it recently.

If you need professional-quality, however, those might not be quite what you're looking for (even if OpenShot can be pretty powerful in combination with InkScape and Blender).

I tried Cinelerra, Kdenlive, and LIVES a while back, and all seemed to crash fairly frequently for me, and Cinelerra in particular had a steeper learning curve than I was willing to deal with. However, they're more professional-quality, full-featured video editors if you need more than what OpenShot, Avidemux, or Pitivi have to offer.

Lightworks is another professional-quality option, but it's (currently) proprietary software and you have to buy the professional version to unlock the full set of features. It's supposed to be released under an open-source license at some point, but they've been teasing that for about 4 years now.?

To me Pitivi is the most promising product - admittedly I'm not an average video cutter but a software developer. The nice thing about Pitivi is that it is highly modular and you can really use its parts to build a specialized video editor or some media processing. Some editors have special APIs or so - with Pitivi that is not necessary because the developers build all the "hard" (non UI) code into modular pieces which I can use to build my stuff.

Pitivi recently started a fundraiser to release their 1.0 version and they made it to 1/3 of the target sum in just 1 1/2 weeks. If someone wants to back a real community project head over to http://fundraiser.pitivi.org/ :-)
I'd like to mention that I think the Pitivi goal is much more achievable (though less "sexy") than the previous OpenShot Kickstarter campaigns because they don't aim to do a custom engine but "just" use (and improve) the complete GStreamer media stack. That means also other software using GStreamer (e.g. Totem) can benefit from Pitivi improvements.

Thanks for article and this is one of those where comments add a lot. I've been using Openshot on Mint dual boots for casual edits, but have missed the ability to work interchangeably with the same software in Windows, something I much appreciate in using GIMP and RawTherapee for photography.

It would have been helpful to add which of these editors are still being actively developed, and which of them run stably enough for daily 'workhorse' use. (Quite a number of them don't meet either of those two criteria.) Another important criterium: Without GPU acceleration, modern-day HD footage is practically not editable on PCs.

And lastly, the most professional Open Source program that also doubles as a video editor is missing on the list: Blender.

when I moved the family over to linux 2 yrs ago, I was told by a Linux user at work to give KDEnlive a try since his kids use it to put their snowboard tricks online and his wife to edit home videos.
I havent really looked at any other since. i read these articles and say that one day when I have 'time' I will get around to installing and trying some others but I have neither the free time nor any more use than what we do with it now (my wife has made a few cooking videos on Youtube with my niece and they love it) which is the general stuff that 99% of users do.
the professional video market is niche, very niche so I always find it fun to read about how that is some kind of problem. its like back in the day when everyone and his brother was a 'web designer' that HAD to have Photoshop.... but I do have to admit having used Lightworks on a friends Mac that it does look interesting. im not sure if the Linux experience is the same though.

Avidemux now just crashes. OpenShot can't pixelate regions without a convoluted process that isn't suitable for clips with much movement. Anything else? I do need to make a complete new installation of Linux Mint, which might fix the Avidemux trouble, this is ridiculous. The best I can do is waste hours placing multiple masks by trial and error or give up and make an animated GIF from screen captures using GIMP.